I really don't know if this belongs here or in Premiere Pro or in AME but since the footage in AE at least looks modiefed after color correction, this looks like maybe the best place. Looked all over; surprised not to find any help re: take footage into AE, color correct using Color Finesse getting desired look. Open said footage in Premiere Pro; looks much darker but oh well. This bad news gets worse: Adobe Encode out of either PPro gives exactly same dark look that PPro shows. This bad news also gets worse. Fire up AME using the AE comp that looks so good. Get exactly the same darker output as PPro shows and as encoding the project gives. Conclusions: 1) PPro "shows" the probable result of color correction and AE telleth the truth not; 2) WYSIWYG just as bad in video world as in print world; i.e. no way to be sure you will get in output what is shown on screen. Tried both MPEG and H264 Blu Ray encoding with presets as given; no joy. Is this a way to really "know" what you're going to get when you cc with AE? (BTW, set 32 bit, linearize color space; tried both REC 709 and sRGB; footage is 24p 1080 .mts from Panasonic GH-1) Update: Next attempt: use PPro RGB color correction to simply adjust the gamma of the footage to approximate the AE image - by visual inspection (turns out had to boost to 1.8). Output exactly the same as in previous Encoder results! Adjusting the gamma had NO effect. So now I have two problems: AE's look being totally lost in either PPro or AME and AME totally ignoring any cc from PPro. Hope someone can shed some light on this as it is a major stumbline block to project completion. What am I doing wrong??

OK so here's a theory. PPro uses AME to encode so therefore it shows the same result (darkening) as AME. Don't know how AE "encodes" but it is clearly different. If this is all so, stll the difference between the same clip in Ppro & AME after cc in AE and that clip in AE is a big problem (remember too that encoding the AE project in AME gives the same darkening output as encoding the PPro project). Also, why does AME ignore the gamma change to PPro? The above results and this idea seem to point to an almost "fixed" set of settings in AME used when encoding.

Erm, sorry to be blunt, but you are trying to fix this in all the wrong places. Straight to the point: You need to calibrate/ un-mistweak your monitor and graphics card. If you need to increase the Gamma by 1.8, then something is seriously wrong here. Reset all manual controls, unassign whatever crooked monitor profile you are using, start over using a plain sRGB mode. For the rest simply look at the help files for the products. There is comprehensive info on color management for AE and also info which features are supported when importing Premiere stuff.